Touch here for mobile friendly version

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Andrew Revkin on Making Veracity Cool

Lately, I’ve come to
frame the challenge as a question: Can we foster an online (and real-life)
culture in which veracity is cool? You’ll see more on this here in the coming
months.

As social primates, we are instinctively motivated to seek
higher status in our given troop hierarchies.The word cool is sometimes used as a synonym for impressive. Impressive denotes
a measure of status. Coolness is any marketer's primary weapon. I like Andy's
idea of making veracity cool, but I'm skeptical it could ever take hold. How
would car marketers ever convince us to buy their cars? Although, certainly,
he's on the right track in that, if you want to change behavior, like getting
people to drive electric cars (or Hummers), convincing them it's cool to drive one will
work wonders.

What I think we need is to teach critical thinking skills in our
schools as part of every math and science course, from grade school through
college, and test for competency like we do for math and science.

His post led me to Climate Feedback, a website
designed to fact check climate change articles. I was struck by how similar
the format was to the Disqus comment software where you can use a little
hypertext markup language to highlight quotes from an article and then discuss
it in detail with links to sources, photos, graphs etc. They also made use
of a veracity score which I have half-seriously used a few times myself, here
and here.

The first question that came to mind was why the scientists didn't
simply post in the comment field under the article? I suggested as much in a comment under
Andy's article and interestingly enough, at least to me, my comment never made
it past the Dot Earth moderator. So, maybe that was the answer to my question.

A weak link with Climate Feedback is that 99.9% of the
public has no idea it exists and isn't likely to ever visit it. My guess is that
they're hoping that commenters under climate change articles will link back to
Climate Feedback, assuming a given comment field will allow links and that the moderator
won't censor it.

Which got me to wondering if anyone had linked back to
Climate Feedback from the
latest article they critiqued.
Nada. Could I really have been the first to check on that or had attempts to
link back to Climate Feedback been censored by the author? I wish them luck but
the last poll I saw suggested that most Americans still don't buy the theory of
evolution. You can lead a horse to water ...

But there was yet another thought that struck me, which was
that Climate Feedback had essentially created their own comment field for that
article, albeit, with access limited to climate researchers, essentially
filtering the wheat from the chaff for readers.

I recall watching a heated exchange between two of my
favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker, at their respective blogs
(neither bothered with the comment field) and I learned a lot from it.
I also once witnessed a similar exchange between George Monbiot and Matt Ridley, which was also very informative.

And finally, why should expert critique be limited to climate science? Shouldn't we be applying some of it to the proposed low carbon energy solutions as well?

One should always take at least a cursory look at a comment
field under an article about energy and/or climate change to check for pertinent
corrections or critique. Learn to skim read past the obvious chaff. Few authors
will update an article based on comment feedback. But let me give you an
example of an exception. Years ago Andy wrote a piece about fossil fuel
subsides:

There’s no surprise in this, but
a new survey by Bloomberg New Energy Finance comparing subsidies for fossil
fuels with those for renewable energy sources finds a glaring gulf — with the
fuels of convenience getting around 10 times the advantages around the world as
non-polluting energy sources. [5:38 p.m.
Updated The perils of blogging on three hours of red-eye sleep became readily
apparent when many comment contributors noted that the most important
comparison is subsidies per unit of energy produced. Thanks, all.]

In other words, thanks to commenters, Andrew realized that fossil
fuels actually receive considerably less subsidy per unit energy than
renewables. This false fossil fuel subsidy argument continues to this day and
is also wrongly applied to nuclear energy. You will never find the right
solutions to climate change using false input, regardless of what you want to believe,
garbage in = garbage out.

I'd like to extend a hat tip to Grist
for recently allowing a rigorous debate to occur in a comment field under one
of their author's articles about nuclear energy. Articles on complex topics
like energy and climate change that don't have comment fields should be
avoided. Comment fields help to keep authors honest, and certainly educate them
even if they may never admit to it. I learn something every day from comment
fields. But more importantly, comment fields inform readers. People who can't be bothered to read the comments under energy and climate change articles are more vulnerable to being misinformed, or quite possibly, want to remain that way.

For more of my thoughts about internet comment fields,
consider reading an earlier article I wrote on this subject: Internet
Baboons.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments that are not respectful of other participants will be deleted, so don't waste your time on a post that will be canned. Feel free to post links to pertinent sources and to your own website as part of your comment. Spam disguised as a comment will also be deleted as will comments that consist primarily of copied and pasted words from other authors (plagiarized content).

About Me

Avid amateur naturalist and aerospace engineer with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, an Associate degree in Aerospace Engineering, Airframe and Powerplant Mechanic Licenses, and private pilot license, all from Purdue University.
I can be contacted via Twitter @biodiversivist